mesa/docs/osmesa.rst
Eric Anholt ee80237218 mesa: Retire classic OSMesa.
The classic OSMesa renders directly into user memory using
src/mesa/swrast, while gallium OSMesa renders using softpipe or llvmpipe
and copies out at glFlush() time.  This would make gallium look like a
worse choice for OSMesa, except that swrast is:

1) Painfully slow to render compared to llvmpipe
2) Incorrect at derivatives
3) Limited to GL 2.1 instead of GL 4.6

In my survey of OSMesa users, debian was the remaining holdout with
classic OSMesa in use on hurd and some rare non-LLVM-supported
architectures (sh4, alpha, etc.).  As of today, they've switched to
softpipe-based gallium OSMesa for them.

To prevent people from running the wrong OSMesa (to the extent that
running OSMesa can ever be the right thing), delete the classic
version.

Reviewed-by: Eric Engestrom <eric.engestrom@intel.com>

Closes: #320
Closes: #877
Closes: #2297
Part-of: <https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/merge_requests/1243>
2020-12-10 18:38:13 +00:00

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Off-screen Rendering
====================
Mesa's off-screen interface is used for rendering into user-allocated
memory without any sort of window system or operating system
dependencies. That is, the GL_FRONT colorbuffer is actually a buffer in
main memory, rather than a window on your display.
The OSMesa API provides three basic functions for making off-screen
renderings: OSMesaCreateContext(), OSMesaMakeCurrent(), and
OSMesaDestroyContext(). See the Mesa/include/GL/osmesa.h header for more
information about the API functions.
The OSMesa interface may be used with the gallium software renderers:
#. llvmpipe - this is the high-performance Gallium LLVM driver
#. softpipe - this it the reference Gallium software driver
There are several examples of OSMesa in the mesa/demos repository.
Building OSMesa
---------------
Configure and build Mesa with something like:
::
meson builddir -Dosmesa=true -Dgallium-drivers=swrast -Ddri-drivers=[] -Dvulkan-drivers=[] -Dprefix=$PWD/builddir/install
ninja -C builddir install
Make sure you have LLVM installed first if you want to use the llvmpipe
driver.
When the build is complete you should find:
::
$PWD/builddir/install/lib/libOSMesa.so
Set your LD_LIBRARY_PATH to point to $PWD/builddir/install to use the
libraries
When you link your application, link with -lOSMesa